Buying Land in Bucks County, Pennsylvania

Lower Bucks: a fully built-out Philadelphia suburb

Lower Bucks County is not a place to look for raw or rural land. Its defining feature is Levittown, the massive planned suburb built between 1951 and 1958 by Levitt & Sons, which aggregated 5,500 acres of farmland and woods spanning Bristol, Middletown, and Falls Townships plus Tullytown Borough into one of the most iconic mass-produced postwar suburbs in the country -- part of the same Levittown formula the company had already used on Long Island. The development followed U.S. Steel's establishment of its Fairless Works in nearby Falls Township, which drew industrial jobs and made the area a natural target for large-scale suburban housing; before that, Bristol Township itself had been primarily agricultural. Decades later, this part of the county -- Bristol, Levittown, Morrisville, and their immediate neighbors -- remains dense, thoroughly built-out suburban and small-city land, governed by mature municipal zoning and largely absent the kind of vacant or agricultural land this site otherwise covers.

Upper Bucks: genuine farmland and rural townships

The northern part of the county tells a different story. Many Upper Bucks townships remain primarily agricultural with limited commercial development, and the county's farmland-preservation efforts show real, ongoing results: Buckingham Township, a rural township in the county's central-to-upper reaches, has permanently protected 6,475 acres from development as of 2025 through a mix of township, county, and land-trust action, and Upper Makefield Township has funded its own farmland-preservation initiatives since the mid-1990s in partnership with the county program and the Heritage Conservancy. This is the part of Bucks County where the site's usual due-diligence questions -- septic feasibility, well water, road frontage, existing conservation easements -- actually apply the way they would in a more conventionally rural Pennsylvania county, in sharp contrast to Lower Bucks.

The countywide Agricultural Land Preservation Program, established in 1989 under state Act 43 and administered jointly with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Farmland Preservation, purchases conservation easements on farms prioritized by soil quality, location, existing conservation practices, and the specific threat of development they face. A farm parcel anywhere in the county -- Upper Bucks especially -- may already carry one of these permanently recorded easements; check the deed and the Recorder of Deeds directly before assuming a large open parcel is available for future subdivision or non-agricultural use.

Zoning: 54 municipalities, no countywide ordinance

Consistent with the statewide pattern, Bucks County itself does not zone land directly. The Bucks County Planning Commission assists the county commissioners and all 54 constituent municipalities with sound land-use practices and policy, but each municipality -- from dense Lower Bucks boroughs to sprawling Upper Bucks townships -- adopts and administers its own separate zoning ordinance. Doylestown Township and Doylestown Borough, though adjoining and sharing a name, each run their own distinct planning commission and zoning process, a useful small-scale illustration of how granular this needs to get: never assume one Bucks County municipality's zoning tells you anything about its neighbor's, even a same-named one.

Septic and wells: one of the few PA counties with countywide health-department permitting for both

Bucks County is one of the small number of Pennsylvania counties that operates its own county health department, and it uses that department to run onlot sewage disposal permitting countywide rather than leaving it to each of the 54 municipalities' own Sewage Enforcement Officers. The Bucks County Department of Health (BCDH) permits new and repaired septic systems, spray irrigation systems, holding tanks, and alternate or experimental systems, requires soil probe and percolation testing before permit issuance, and requires a written "Approval to Cover" and final inspection before a new system's structure can be occupied. Some individual townships (Plumstead, for instance) additionally run their own local sewage management programs on top of the county process.

BCDH runs a parallel, less widely known program on the water side: since 2007, it has required its own construction permit (form SA-130) for any private well not already regulated by the state -- effectively every residential well in the county -- with a specific rule requiring any septic component within 125 feet of a proposed well to be staked before the well permit is approved. Most Pennsylvania counties have no equivalent well-permitting requirement at all, so don't assume a Bucks County well can simply be drilled once a driller is hired; confirm the current BCDH permit and fee first.

Records, GIS, and other departments to know

The Bucks County Recorder of Deeds (55 E. Court St., Doylestown; 215-348-6209) holds recorded deeds, agricultural conservation easements, and plats. The Assessor's Office (215-348-6219) and Treasurer (215-348-6244) handle property valuation, tax records, and payment history, and the county's Mapping/GIS resources provide parcel boundaries and aerial imagery online. Given the sharp Upper/Lower Bucks divide, confirming exactly which municipality and general part of the county a specific parcel sits in -- before assuming either an urban-suburban or a rural due-diligence checklist applies -- is a genuinely useful first step here.